This invention relates in general to over-the-top (OTT) media delivery and more specifically to targeted advertisement replacement for near-real-time streaming media.
Near-real-time delivery protocols are popular for OTT media delivery due to their simplicity, their ability to adapt to varying network conditions through the use of rate adaptation, and the low cost of deployment using commodity HTTP delivery infrastructures. OTT media delivery typically relies on a segment-based retrieval paradigm using the HTTP protocol. HTTP adaptive streaming uses multiple encodings (each encoded at a different bitrate, resolution, and/or frame rate), allowing the client to select an appropriate encoding for its local network conditions. Manifest files are used to convey encoding information to clients. Manifest files are also used to indicate segment retrieval locations. For real-time (live) content, segments and manifest files are produced and retrieved by clients in real-time.